fontpreview

This previewer started as a clone of https://github.com/sdushantha/fontpreview, written by github user sdushantha. They created a clever mechanism for quickly getting a look at the contents of a font, in an easy to navigate way. It's not clear that the original project is still being maintained, so I've kind of had my way with the code, and it's diverged quite a bit. The rest of the README describes my version, though from a high level it's still pretty similar to sdushantha's.

fontpreview lets you quickly search through installed fonts using the fzf "fuzzy matcher", and preview them. The previewer (any of sxiv, nsxiv, or feh will work) is normally reused for each new font, but it's also possible to bring up a separate preview for every selection.

Dependencies

Things you might need to fetch from your package manager:

• xdotool
• fzf
• imagemagick
• nsxiv, sxiv, or feh

Usage Summary

usage:

 fontpreview [options] <fontfile>
    to preview a font from its file (.otf, .ttf)

 fontpreview [options] <fontfile> <imagefile>
    to create an image from the preview

 fontpreview [options]
    interactive use

 Options:
   -text                   text to be previewed
   -font-size              font size for the preview window
   -no-preview-header      don't include the font name in the preview
   -multi-viewer           spawn new viewer per font.  (clean up manually.)
   -bg-color <colorspec>   background color for the preview window
   -fg-color <colorspec>   foreground color for the preview window
   -size WxH               width and height in pixels (overrides autosizing)
   -position +X+Y/-X-Y     position, as in X geometry (see "man X")

   All options can be shortened to the first character of each word in
       the option:  e.g., '-fs' for '-font-size', or '-t' for '-text'.
       (Or, reduced to the the shortest unique prefix.)
   Either '-' or '--' can introduce any option.

Installation

Simply download the script, make it executable, and put it in your PATH somewhere. To download from github, click on the script "fontpreview", then use the "hamburger" menu or ctrl-shift-s to download it. You'll need to "mv fontpreview.txt fontpreview" after it's downloaded.

Customization

Hey, it's a shell script -- customize all you want. ;-) If you just want to change some of the predefined defaults for color, size, etc, there's provision for putting those new definitions into $HOME/.fontpreview. See the script for the names of the variables that can be changed in that way.